Focus on Faculty & Institute Initiatives

Bandana Purkayastha Receives 2016 American Sociological Association Contribution to the Field Award

The president elect for the Asia & Asian American section of the American Sociological Association, Jianbin Shiao, presented the 2016 Contribution to the Field Award to AAASI’s core faculty Bandana Purkayastha. This award recognizes professors who have worked to build the fields of Asian and/or Asian American Studies within their institutions and the discipline at large.

ASA Pres. Elect JIANBIN SHIAO at left with BANDANA PURKAYASTHA

On hand to show their support for this prestigious honor were UConn alumni, many of them her former advisees and now current professors in the field. Also in attendance were AAASI colleague Manisha Desai and CLAS Associate Dean Davita Glasberg, both of whom are also fellow Sociology faculty at UConn.

In his remarks, Dr Shiao noted that Bandana Purkayastha’s nomination included letters of support from 23 colleagues, including many of her former advisees who now fill tenure-track faculty lines. He pointed out that Purkayastha has been recognized seven times before, for teaching and mentoring awards from her home department, the University of Connecticut, the State of Connecticut, and the ASA. And while Purkayastha is a prolific scholar, whose work appears in 11 books and over 50 peer reviewed articles

News

Professor Michael Ego has received a UConn Scholarship Facilitation Fund for his project, A Pilot Study: Measurement of Effectiveness of Baseball Reminiscence Program for Persons with Dementia in Cos Cob, CT. An article in UConn Today entitled, “Talking Baseball Assists Aging Adults with Dementia” features Professor Michael Ego’s work on baseball reminiscence for adults with […]

On April 12, 2017, The Stamford Advocate published the Op-Ed “Showing remorse for Executive Order 9066” by UConn professor Michael Ego. The article reflects of the exhibit entitled “Images of Internment: The Incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II” at the FDR museum and library in Hyde Park, New York. Recently, I visited the […]

On April 23, 2017 the Stamford Advocate published an Op-ed article co-written by University of Connecticut Professors Preston A. Britner and Michael M. Ego entitled “The Dividends of a Public Research University.” Noting the rise of UConn among the Top 20 of 133 U.S. public research universities, they primarily point to the work that dedicated […]

A film screening introduced and discussed by EDDY ZHENG and Director BEN WANG.

This documentary tells the true and complex story of Eddy Zheng - arrested at 16 and tried as an adult for kidnapping and robbery, he served over 20 years in California prisons and jails. Director Ben Wang paints an intimate portrait of Eddy - the prisoner, the immigrant, the son, the activist - on his journey to freedom, rehabilitation and redemption.

"I spent 21 years of my life in prison for crimes committed at the age of 16. Since returning to the free world in 2007, I have dedicated my life to serving the youth and communities of the greater San Francisco Bay Area. I hope to use my experiences to inspire and motivate young people to invest in their education; raise awareness about the detrimental impact that the Prison Industrial Complex has on the Asian and Pacific Islander population; and, promote racial harmony among people of color." - Eddy Zheng

In this presentation Professor ANITA MANNUR will examine the value of turning to visual culture to examine how gender roles are being reimagined within the context of gendered household economy. She focuses her analysis on Ritesh Batraâs film The Lunchbox, a surprising hit in late 2013 and contender for Indiaâs official nomination to the Oscar foreign film award.

Batraâs feature-length film is one of the few to structure its story around the âfailureâ of the dabbawalla (Indiaâs lunchbox delivery system). When a lunchbox is delivered to the wrong address, Saajan the office worker who receives the unintended epistle (the meal) responds in kind with his own epistleâin his case a letter written in English. Over a series of weeks, the erroneous exchanges of epistles continue. The sender, Ila sends her âculinaryâ messages in the form of delicious meals packed into a tiffin, accompanied by a letter written in Marathi, and Saajan responds with his own epistle written in English, enclosed in the empty dabba. Through this serendipitous error, these two strangers build a relationship that develops entirely through the exchange of written and culinary epistles.

Prof. Mannurâs talk asks what productive intimacies might emerge in the spaces through which human error and fallibility fail to secure the kinds of intimacies that the dabbawalla system is designed to broker, and ultimately focuses on reinserting the place of the female in the domestic space in understanding how to think through the narrative of the dabbawalla.

Anita Mannur is Associate Professor of English and Asian/Asian American Studies at Miami University at Oxford, Ohio. Editor in Chief of the Journal of Asian American Studies, her books include Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture, Eating Asian America: A Reader, and Theorizing Diaspora. She is also Director of Womenâs, Gender and Sexuality Studies.

Free and Open to the Public, this event is sponsored by the Asian/Asian American Studies Institute. Please contact Cathy.Schlund-Vials@uconn.edu for more information.

Indian Nationalism and Global Fascism. Legacies of Solidarity from 1930's (Spain, Ethiopia and China). Speaker Vijay Prashad Professor of International Studies at Trinity College Free and open to the public.

UPSTREAM/DOWNSTREAMVibha Galhotra is a New Dehli based conceptual artist whose large-scale sculptures address the shifting topography of the world under the impact of globalization and growth. Her work dwells between belief and reality, public and personal, science and spirituality, personal and public (common). The tradition-based beliefs about our environment stimulate her to compare the former with the present state of the environment in the age of Anthropocene and the latterâs impact on human health. The relational aspect of her work encourages her to seek meaningful collaborations through which she can be a part of the restructuring of culture, society and geography in her surroundings and around the world, responding to the rapid environmental changes and re-zoning of land. A recent awardee of the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio residency in 2016, at present, she is an Asian Cultural Council fellow in the US, pursuing continual research on belief and reality to intervene on the subject of Anthropocene. Being an artist, Galhotra believes that aesthetics and art can be a starting point towards addressing the adversities of the present and bringing in change. Her work, consequently, crosses the dimensions of art, ecology, economy, science, spirituality, and activism. While she claims that she is an artist and not an activist, however, her work is imbued with social responsibility.

6 pm - Reception6:30 pm - Talk

Co-sponsored by India Studies at the Asian and Asian American Studies Institute.

Keynote by KARUNA MANTENA, Associate Professor of Political Science at Yale University. She holds a BSc(Econ) in International Relations from the London School of Economics (1995), an MA in Ideology and Discourse Analysis from the University of Essex (1996), and a PhD in Government from Harvard University (2004). Her research interests include modern political thought, modern social theory, the theory and history of empire, and South Asian politics and history.

Her first book, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton Univ. Press, 2010), analyzed the transformation of nineteenth-century British imperial ideology. Her current work focuses on political realism and the political thought of M.K. Gandhi.

Since 2011, Professor Mantena has served as co-director of the International Conference for the Study of Political Thought. And she is also currently the Chair of the South Asian Studies Council at Yale University.

RECEPTION OF LIGHT REFRESHMENTS FOLLOWING Q&A

CONTACT FOR UPDATES: Betty.Hanson@uconn.edu or Cathy.Schlund-Vials@uconn.edu

Author Reading and Talkback with Stephen Clingman of University Massachusetts at Amherst

âBirthmark: Divided Vision & the Coming of Perspectiveâ

Professor STEPHEN CLINGMAN will read from Birthmark (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), a memoir of divided vision in the divided world of apartheid South Africa. When Stephen was two, he underwent an operation to remove a birthmark under his right eye. The operation failed, and the birthmark returned. Clingman takes the fact of that mark â its appearance, disappearance, and return â as a guiding motif of memory. In a beguiling narrative set on three continents, this is a story that is personal, painful, comic, and ultimately uplifting: a book not so much of the coming of age but the coming of perspective.

Stephen Clingman is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts. He is also the author of Bram Fischer: Afrikaner Revolutionary, which won the Alan Paton Award, South Africaâs premier prize for non-fiction.

Copies of Birthmark will be available for purchase and may be personalized at this open to the public event. Contact Barnes & Noble at Storrs Center to order your copy in advance. For Info about this event, please email Cathy.Schlund-Vials@uconn.edu .